While challenges to progress mount, it will take even greater skill, determination and commitment to achieve our goal of ending homelessness.

People who work on homelessness, in cities and towns and rural areas, in state and federal capitals, have faced the worst economy in many decades. We have confronted indiscriminate cuts in federal funding even while levels of poverty, rent burden and housing instability continue to rise. Ambitious commitments on the part of some federal decision makers have been threatened by partisan rancor and disagreement.

And yet in many communities across the nation, the number of people who are homeless has gone down – sometimes substantially. And nationally, we have forestalled an increase in the number of people living on the streets and in shelters.

How has this happened? […]